Immigration, Islam, and the Politics of Belonging in France. Elaine R. Thomas

Book of the Month Club are of inferior literary quality and unworthy of being read, but nonetheless neglects to cancel the membership, perhaps because it was a gift and the books look nice on the shelf, is unremarkable, if a bit lazy. By contrast, a person who is adamantly opposed to racism but is a member of the KKK because her mother already paid the membership dues, she loves the pointy hats that come in the mail, and enjoys horseback riding is shocking. That person’s membership is morally compromising in a way that the first person’s continued membership in the Book of the Month Club is not.

      The reason is that being a member of the Book of the Month Club is a matter of paying fees. It is a membership you voluntarily end by canceling. As long as the fees are paid, membership in the Book of the Month Club is unproblematic. Conversely, one’s integrity as a member and the very issue of whether one “really” is a member do become problematic if one fails to pay the bills for several months. The KKK, by contrast, is a membership you voluntarily end by leaving. As such, it is a membership whose defining feature is subjective identification with the group. Being a dues-paying KKK member who dislikes racism is therefore a contradiction in a way that being a Book of the Month Club member who dislikes reading is not.

      Change, and No Exit. These last two categories are comprised of those troublesome memberships in groups one might think you would “leave,” except that you cannot. Such groups include your family (of birth), your gender, or your sexual orientation. In these cases, you cannot just cancel or quit. You cannot even leave. You have to “change,” if you can; otherwise, you are stuck. Let us call these last two categories Change memberships and No Exit memberships respectively. One might argue that people do “leave” their families of origin all the time, just as they “leave home.” However, when one talks of someone “leaving” his or her family or “leaving home,” one is usually referring to physical departure, not to the termination of the membership in question.¹ If one leaves one’s family of origin to attend a college out of town, one is still a member of the family, like it or not. Conversely, however, one also cannot be expelled. The family to which one belongs by birth differs in this respect from that to which one may belong by marriage, which one may theoretically leave or abandon.

      In contrast to memberships one can get out of by quitting, canceling, or leaving, memberships one can terminate only by “changing” or cannot terminate at all are not normally acquired by choice and do not depend on subjective identification. Change and “No Exit” memberships are memberships in categories to which one is assigned, by oneself or by others, based on personal attributes, such as mother tongue, sexual orientation, or income bracket. Like memberships in Leave groups, memberships in Change groups often figure prominently in members’ personal self-definition. But unlike memberships in Leave groups, memberships in Change groups do not depend on such identification. Whether or not one subjectively identifies with the category or defining attribute in question or “chooses” such memberships, one “is” a member of such groups if one meets some given objective criteria.

      When people deny belonging to particular Leave groups to which they are thought by other people to belong, they may simply be correcting others’ beliefs about how they identify themselves. By contrast, seemingly equivalent denials of Change and No Exit membership are more apt to be regarded as untrue. There are other possibilities, however. Such denials may also be corrections of misperceptions regarding the purported members’ actual possession of the defining characteristic. For instance, the person who denies being a speaker of Hungarian may simply mean: “You think I speak Hungarian because my parents do, but I actually do not speak Hungarian.” Or, the person who denies being a woman may mean simply: “Because of my delicate features you seem to have mistaken me for a woman, but I am actually a man.”

      In other cases, denials of such memberships may represent challenges to others’ understanding of the boundaries and definition of the attribute(s) defining the category. For instance, the person who denies being a German speaker may mean that he or she speaks too little German to really qualify as such. Disagreements of this kind also arise concerning race. “Whites” typically consider the skin color, hair, or epicanthic fold of the individual in question and his or her ancestors the defining attribute, but others in some cases regard speech, social circle, and demeanor as decisive, leading to disagreements about what people “really” are.

      Finally, in some cases, individuals’ denials of Change or No Exit memberships attributed to them signal deeper confusion about whether a given membership is really a Change type that depends on objective characteristics or rather a Leave type depending instead on personal identification. For instance, a person who denies being a “New Yorker” may mean that, though assumed to be a New Yorker based on the fact of living in New York, he still, deep down, feels and considers himself a Minnesotan. The person is asserting that “New Yorker” is correctly understood as a Leave-type membership depending on personal identification, not a Change-type membership depending on objective characteristics. Similarly, but at a much more profound and consequential level, someone who denies being a “man” may mean: “I have the anatomical features you think objectively define someone as a man, but I do not feel like a man and thus am truly a woman. You are wrong about what defines being a ‘man.’” The speaker here, again, is asserting that, contrary to what many may think, the membership to which s/he has been assigned depends ultimately on personal identification, that it is not really a Change-type membership but rather a Leave-type membership. Such disputes show both that there is not always unanimity about what kind of membership a given instance of belonging represents and that the difference between Leave and Change memberships is consequential, giving rise to potentially significant confusion and disagreement.

      Although people may, in fact, identify with memberships that can be ended only by changing, as they do with memberships that can be ended simply by leaving, subjective self-identification is not the defining feature of Change memberships.² Subjective self-definition is the defining feature of memberships only in Leave groups. We implicitly recognize that this difference exists, as is demonstrated by our using the verb “to leave” for ending some kinds of memberships and not others. Accidental Anglophones are bona fide English-speakers, like it or not—unless they can change. An accidental Democrat (e.g., someone who accidentally made a stray mark on a voter registration form) is not a bona fide Democrat.

      In short, memberships can be divided into five types according to the verbs we ordinarily use for the act of voluntarily ending them: Cancel memberships, Quit memberships, Leave memberships, Change memberships, and those we cannot end voluntarily, which I shall call No Exit memberships (see Table 2.1). These subtypes are already implicitly distinguished in ordinary English usage as reflected in the regularities of verb choice. That is, in choosing between voluntary exit verbs, we already unreflectively classify memberships this way all the time.

      Appendix Table 2 shows how the initial full list of verbs can be regrouped into a few categories, each consisting of one more common and general verb together with a larger number of more specialized verbs of each type. Although the existence of a much larger number of voluntary exit verbs than the four discussed here does complicate the picture somewhat, it does not undermine the idea of a basic fivefold typology implicit in ordinary language. Indeed, the same typology also accounts for patterns of usage revealed by examining our usual ways of referring to involuntarily losing or acquiring one’s membership in different kinds of groups.

      Involuntary Terminations of Memberships

      In ordinary language, our discussion of involuntary terminations of memberships follows regularities that can be readily grasped in terms of the same fivefold schema presented in Table 2.1. That typology is thus not merely idiosyncratic, or limited only to choice of voluntary exit verbs. It is also reflected in patterns of usage for discussing other actions related to different sorts of memberships.

      Some memberships can be terminated by groups without the consent of their members. Such involuntary terminations of membership are normally possible in the case of Cancel, Quit, and Leave groups. Memberships in No Exit groups by definition cannot normally be terminated, either voluntarily or involuntarily, and involuntary terminations of memberships